Vet scholars shadow vets

by Dr Gary Buhrmann, garyb@elsenburg.com

TThe Faculty of Veterinary Science at Onderstepoort in Pretoria is the only veterinary faculty in South Africa. The entry requirements have changed recently from being based solely on academic achievements to also assessing the time spent job shadowing and getting practical experience with qualified state veterinarians.

As a consequence, State Boland and the Stellenbosch veterinary laboratory hosted and mentored 22 potential vet students in the first half of 2019. These enthusiastic young ”vets in the making” experienced a variety of hands-on activities, from working with buffalo, cheetah, alpacas, ostriches, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, dogs, cats, ducks, chickens, parrots, and even trout. They visited farms and export quarantine facilities and were taught special techniques such as neck, tail and wing bleeding from various animals, skin testing for tuberculosis, fish tissue sampling, throat swabbing and vaccination of different animal species. At the laboratory their senses were challenged further when they saw post-mortems, learnt how to count worm eggs, culture bacteria and fungi, test for viruses, and view creepy-crawly parasites under the microscope.

Of the 22 scholars there was only one young man! It begs the question, “Are male vets a threatened species?” There has been a dramatic change over the years. Whereas men once dominated the field, these days 70% of the vets qualifying are women. These young ladies are entering all fields of the profession, including large animal, exotic species, consultancy practices and even aquaculture. It seems like the young men may have relinquished their love of animals for the higher-paying engineering and IT careers!

This was a combined effort between the state vets and animal health technicians serving the youth of today, by enabling them to gain entrance into the career of their choice. Of the 22 shadowers, five scholars from the Western Cape contingent gained entry! This is very good, considering that more than 600 applications for Onderstepoort are received from all nine provinces annually, of which only 200 are ultimately accepted. Congratulations to these scholars because the long hard road to being a veterinarian has just begun. If they thought it was difficult getting in, wait until they try to get out seven years later!

Finally, a quote from one of the scholars: “It’s amazing how sometimes a penny just drops and a light turns on – after my job shadowing at Elsenburg the passion flame ignited!”